Online courses directory (5)

This course presents material in discrete mathematics and computation theory with a strong emphasis on practical algorithms and experiential learning. Discrete mathematics, also called finite mathematics or decision mathematics, is the study of mathematical structures that are fundamentally discrete in the sense of not supporting or requiring the notion of continuity. Objects studied in finite mathematics are largely countable sets such as integers, finite graphs, and formal languages. Concepts and notations from discrete mathematics are useful to study or describe objects or problems in computer algorithms and programming languages. The CDM course is currently under development and we are making the course available while it is under development. Only one of the planned fifteen modules is currently available. The module on Groups that is currently available would appear mid-way through the complete course.

Programming is a way of organizing a task so that it is replicable by something elsea computer. If you have ever given someone directions, or written down a recipe, you have some experience with programming. Learning more about programming will help you develop the skills of thinking systematically about a task and breaking it down into manageable pieces, which can be applied in many disciplines. This class contextualizes the task of programming by focusing on media, such as images, audio, and interactive systems. By doing so, we hope to put programming in a relevant context. For example, iteration is a programming concept that is essential to creating negative and grayscale images. You will learn algorithms for blending two images together and how to hierarchical relationships are used to organize elements of a user interface. This introductory course has no particular prerequisites and is primarily designed for non-computer science students.

This course provides an introduction to Python and elementary principles of computing, including iteration, recursion, and binary representation of data. Additional topics on cellular automata, encryption, and the limits of computation are also introduced. The goal of this course is to introduce some of the techniques used in computer science to solve complex problems, with or without a computer. The Python modules are used to introduce and illustrate conditionals and iteration; additional topics are provided without using a specific programming language and can be incorporated into classes that do not use Python.

This course is designed to help students (primarily incoming college freshmen) develop the foundational computing and information literacy skills that they will need to succeed in other courses. The course is available for use in academic settings.

An ongoing development effort in collaboration with the Software Engineering Institute’s CERT [1], this course focuses on common security issues in C and C++ development. With security expert Robert Seacord serving as lead content author, the course addresses a key need in professional education for software developers. Topics to be covered include the secure and insecure use of integers, arrays, strings, dynamic memory, formatted input/output functions, and file I/O. Continued development is being funded by partnerships with industry. [1] http://www.cert.org/